A few messages with my Russian friends

They don’t know (probably!) I’m quoting them in some of my stories. They don’t even know I write on Medium.

We’re very close. Five of us. Our friendship spans decades. The cradle of our friendship is … Cambridge. Yes, we’re Russian but we all went to this renowned ancient institution. We were probably the first very wave of young people from post-Soviet Russia to make it to full-time education at Cambridge and the like. Our backgrounds and journeys to Cambridge were very different but we all worked hard to get there. Not sure we worked as hard once at Cambridge. We had a lot of fun, lots of beers and other drinks! We were young and we were students! We went for runs together too.

We then went on to work in investment banking or other consulting industries. We were spread out between London and Moscow. At some point, all of us either moved to or were spending a lot of time in Moscow because in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s the country was one of the fastest growing in the world. There was so much hope (and hype!).

Given our Westernized backgrounds, our political views are similar. Of course, there is a sense of shock and profound frustration watching Putin destroy overnight (and then continue to destroy) the foundation, the fabric of modern society and economy that had taken decades to build. That society, that economy had flaws and many problems, no doubt but the sheer passage of time — thirty years since the end of the Soviet Union — helped the country stabilize and build…